Stop the delays, build the school

Middletown Mayor Joe DeStefano got an expensive vocabulary lesson this week, paid for by city taxpayers and elementary school students.

Middletown Mayor Joe DeStefano got an expensive vocabulary lesson this week, paid for by city taxpayers and elementary school students.

The problem is, he still can't pass the test, still appears to have no idea what the words "unlawful," "arbitrary," "capricious" and "an abuse of discretion" mean even though the school district, its lawyers, the state Education Department and now a Supreme Court judge have used them to describe his efforts to block the construction of an elementary school.

The lesson came in the long-awaited decision in a lawsuit brought by the schools against the mayor and others in the city. With the decision in hand, the state has given the district final approval, the board is moving into action, and work should soon begin on a school that would have welcomed its first students this fall had the mayor not stepped in. And it's still not clear if he will get out of the way or waste more time and money by appealing.

Up until last winter, plans for the school had proceeded smoothly through all the required layers of approval from the state, local residents and even the city. It was clear, as the district argued and the judge agreed, that the new school would hook up to the sewer system, just as the old school had. Nobody had any question about that.

Then, the mayor decided that instead of paying to hook up to the sewer system, the school would have to pay millions to rebuild the line far from school property.

As the judge explained in rejecting that idea, "were the district to fund the 3,300 feet of sewer line demanded" it would "benefit numerous private and commercial water district users."

That's just one of the many lessons DeStefano can't seem to understand. While the mayor still is talking about how much this decision will cost the city, he's ignoring the lesson that the judge is trying to teach. The city has to pay for improvements and can't just decide that it will make some pay for the benefit of others.

Point by point, the judge dismissed the cases that the city's lawyers came up with in an attempt to prove that making somebody pay in this manner was standard procedure. Not only did the judge reject the arguments, he went out of his way to say that they were "not persuasive" and were trying to force the school district to take actions that by law and fact were "not reasonable."

The mayor is not the only one on the losing side in this lawsuit. Two school board members who have been persistent critics of the school administration, Nicholas Mauro and Roy Paul, were only too happy to join with the mayor and work against the interests of the district and the students. Any time they can oppose the superintendent, Ken Eastwood, they will.

Well, Eastwood was right all along on this one. He understood that when the community voted to support this new school, his job was to work in good faith to meet that goal. It's time for the dissident board members and the mayor to join him for the good of Middletown and its students.